ABC's "Path to 9/11" Still Clear

Don't believe the hype. Or believe it. Either way, don't decide either way until you've watched all five hours.

That's pretty much the gist of ABC's message to potential viewers of the network's two-part miniseries The Path to 9/11, which airs commercial-free Sunday and Monday. (Ironically there will now be a 20-minute break Monday at 9 p.m. to accommodate a speech from President Bush.)

While ABC has stated that the $40 million production is still in the editing process and is being slightly tweaked in response to concerns that it unfairly attacks the Clinton administration for failure to act on terrorist threats in the years leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the network has not bowed to pressure from former Cabinet members and left-wing groups to "dump," "yank" or otherwise pull the movie from the schedule.

The Democratic National Committee, for one, submitted a petition signed by 200,000 people calling for ABC to drop the "right-wing, factually inaccurate mocudrama." The Center for American Progress Action Fund announced it had collected 25,000 letters asking for either a heavy edit or a cancellation. "The miniseries presents an agenda that blames the Clinton administration for the 9/11 attacks while ignoring numerous errors and failures of the Bush administration," the advocacy group said in a statement.

Conservative blogs, meanwhile, are putting up a spirited defense. And Rush Limbaugh seems to have high hopes for the miniseries, saying during his radio show last week: "From what I've been told, the film really zeros in on the shortcomings of the Clinton administration." He said today, "What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a mob-like reaction from partisan hacks to intimidate an American broadcast network."

In 2003 CBS shuttled The Reagans off to a less high-profile airing on Showtime after right-wing groups attacked the film's accuracy. (Leading left-wing groups to attack CBS for engaging in censorship.)

"How many miniseries have there been on the Kennedys?" a Hollywood producer told Variety Friday. "Did anybody complain as they dragged them through the mud? Starting with The Reagans, everything is now political. It's become so divisive and nasty. It's very sad."

This furor over the five-hour docudrama, which reportedly depicts high-level Clinton allies hemming and hawing about taking out Osama bin Laden and his cronies back in the 1990s, is "premature and irresponsible," ABC said. "We hope viewers will watch the entire broadcast of the finished film before forming an opinion about it.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called a scene that shows her warning the Pakistani government before an impending airstrike on Afghanistan (which supposedly allowed for bin Laden's escape) false and defamatory.

The man behind the man, former Vice President Al Gore, issued a statement Friday saying he was "deeply concerned that ABC is considering going forward with their plans to broadcast this so-called docudrama."

Former President Clinton, ever the diplomat, told reporters in Arkansas Thursday that he hadn't seen the film but "I think they ought to tell the truth, particularly if they are going to claim it is based on the 9/11 commission report. They shouldn't have scenes that are directly contradicted by the findings of the 9/11 report." The Clinton Foundation then issued a statement calling the film a "despicable, irresponsible fraud."

Apparently even one of the miniseries' major stars wasn't so sure about where "docu-" ended and "-drama" began.

"When I received the script, it said ABC history project," Harvey Keitel, who plays FBI counterterrorism expert John O'Neill, told CNN Headline News' Showbiz Tonight. "I took it to be exactly what they presented to me, history. And that the facts were correct. It turned out not all the facts were correct and ABC set out trying to heal that problem. In some instances it was too late because we had begun." O'Neill was killed on 9-11 in the attack on the World Trade Center.

"I'm not sure that what they think is there, is there," The Path to 9/11 executive producer Marc Platt told the Associated Press. The criticism is "a distraction in some ways from the bigger intentions [of the film], which is a shame. And that's quite frankly what the whole 9/11 story is about."

According to reports, a scene alluding to the idea that then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger put the kibosh on an order to kill bin Laden has been "toned down."

"That sequence has been the focus of attention," a source close to the production told the Los Angeles Times.

ABC has also altered the credits to say that the film is "based in part" on the 9/11 Commission Report rather than "based on" the document.

An ABC executive told the Washington Post that any changes that were made "intended to make clearer that it was general indecisiveness, not any one individual," that left the United States vulnerable to attack on 9/11.

Ex-New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane, who chaired the 9/11 commission and served as a consultant on The Path to 9/11, was asked to pull his weight with the filmmakers to have the project scrapped, but he has since spoken out in support of the picture.

"It's something the American people should see," Keane said during an interview on Good Morning America Friday. "Because you understand how these people wanted to do us harm, developed this plot and how the machinations of the American government under two administrations not only failed to stop them, but even failed to slow them down."

Keane did ask the filmmakers to take some of the complaints into consideration, however.

"These are people of integrity," Keane told the Post. "I know there are some scenes where words are put in characters' mouths. But the whole thing is true to the spirit of 9/11."

But it's not true to the spirit of the 9/11 commission, according to some.

Clinton Foundation chief executive Bruce Lindsey wrote in a letter to Keane: "Your defense of the outright lies in this film is destroying the bipartisan aura of the 9/11 Commission and tarnishing the hard work of your fellow commissioners."

Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen from 1997 to 2001 (the U.S. destroyer Cole was bombed by Al Qaeda in 2000) and a visiting scholar at MIT, laid out the differences she sees between the 9/11 Commission Report and ABC's miniseries in some not-uncertain terms.

"The Path to 9/11 opts for fiction when fact is needed and chooses mythmaking when the candor of history is called for," Bodine wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed Friday. "The 9/11 commission report tells the story with clear-eyed honesty, precision and studious impartiality.

"The ABC drama does not."